The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman

As often seems to be the case with particularly special books, I came across The Yellow Wallpaper just when I needed it most. Several years ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, I had a nervous breakdown. In my worst moments I could barely move and could not speak, even though the words I desperately wanted to say were in my head, it was as though they were hiding on the other side of my forehead, and there they stayed. Sometimes, often after an hour or so of uncontrollable hysteria, it felt of the utmost importance to move around the interior of my home as quietly as possible. I would stay close to the walls, almost creeping about the place.
One of the most upsetting elements for me at this time was my inability to absorb myself in books. All my life I have loved books and read voraciously; being able to sink into the pages of the stories of others has been therapeutic and given me strength on a regular basis. Now I was faced with not being able to even understand the words in front of me, let alone the concept of a page or book. Even road signs were a bit of a mystery at times. After many months recovering, I finally reached a stage where I was once again able to lose myself in other people’s fictions, but suddenly I found I wanted a different kind of truth than the kind one finds in novels.
I had felt the stigma that still comes with illnesses of the mind and had felt ashamed of my ‘condition’, felt weak for allowing it to dominate me, had even managed to keep it a secret from the vast majority of friends and family members. Even those who did know were certainly unaware of just how ill I was. I felt alone in the cold cell of unique experience, so now I could read again all I wanted was accounts of other people also being dominated by what Winston Churchill named as his ‘black dog’. I read hungrily, devouring book after book of non-fiction accounts of breakdowns, depression and anxiety, scouring the pages for similarity of experience, making lists from the bibliographies of more books to read. Whilst I was somewhat reassured that I was not alone in what I had gone through, there was something missing, I was not learning anything new about myself, or indeed about the human condition. Listed in one of the bibliographies however wasThe Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I had never heard of it, did not know if it was fiction or non-fiction or even if it was in print but, apart from being attracted by its title, something told me I had to read it. Not to be found on any of the shelves in any of the book shops in my nearest city, I had an anxious fortnight wait while I waited for my order to arrive.
I have to admit I was slightly disappointed on the Thursday afternoon I collected my new acquisition; it would not be making any dents in the book shelf. My disappointment was short lived however. At just twenty-seven pages, The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story with the depth and layering of the best of novels.
The narrator is in the process of a breakdown and her physician husband, John, has prescribed the Rest Cure, taking her to an empty and remote ancestral hall and allocating her a room at the top of the house where the wallpaper is torn off in large patches all round the room “...repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”
The Rest Cure was a treatment for ‘nervous weakness or disorder’ introduced by S. Weir Mitchell, a physician of high standing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Conditions such as extreme anxiety and depression were thought of as illnesses only affecting women. Indeed, Mitchell himself believed that it was part of the make up of women, and declared “The man who does not know sick women does not know women.”
It involved being confined to bed for up to two months without any activity or stimulation. She would not be allowed visitors, or to read a book, to sew, write or even to sit up in bed. A nurse would feed the patient and would even insist on the same position being adopted and not to move without permission and help. The patient was not even allowed to leave the bed to use the toilet and in some cases was directed to use the bed pan lying down. In the last weeks of the Rest Cure, the importance of keeping ones feelings to oneself, rather than being weak and submitting to them, would be drummed into the patient, apparently to prevent the recurrence of the illness.
Gilman was herself treated by the highly respected and renowned Mitchell and sharply understood that his treatment was a kind of prison, that treating a mental illness with a physical ‘cure’ only made matters worse. The Yellow Wallpaper, which is the text the narrator is secretly penning when alone, wonderfully describes the heart breaking loneliness and boredom this treatment produced in its patients. The narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, eventually seeing a woman trapped behind the complicated and oppressive pattern which surrounds her and mirrors the restrictions of the patriarchal society in which she lives. She imagines the woman in the wallpaper breaking free and writes that sometimes she even sees her from the window, walking across the garden, away from the house.
Her husband is away working in the city most of the time on ‘serious cases’ and the only other person in the house is her husbands sister, who is looking after the narrators baby, being careful to keep mother and baby far apart at all times. She finds herself trapped and alone, in an ‘ancestral hall’ which has been empty for years, and we can really feel the ghosts of women of previous generations, their apparent mental weakness being used as a tool for their own oppression and subjugation. Even though there are many rooms from which to choose, John has confined his wife to a former nursery which also contains the paraphernalia of an asylum or prison - bars on the windows, “rings and things” in the walls and a locked gate at the top of the stairs.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a profound and moving story of mental deterioration and as we read we feel almost spiritually connected with those women who longed to escape, who sometimes descended into madness because they were kept away from what would have made them healthy members of society, and the sadness of how the cure for that madness could often make the illness worse, sending the patient into a despair of entrapment and, as in The Yellow Wallpaper, finding that the only freedom and escape available to them in the end was to descend in a madness reminiscent of Bedlam, that here also lay some essence of a verisimilitude absent from the contradictions of being a woman expected to be everything to those around her, and nothing to herself.
Reading The Yellow Wallpaper brought me back to my beloved fiction, helped me start to feel alive again, reminded me that I have both a physical and mental self and that I should not feel ashamed of the illness from which I was slowly recovering any more than I should be ashamed of a broken leg, because it is shame that will hide us away and make it easier for others to say it is not their problem. Above all, The Yellow Wallpaper shows that sometimes, truth can only really be found in the pages of fiction.
__________
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Virago. Pb. 64pp. £4.99

Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman.

Originally a series of columns in Civilization magazine, Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, is a collection of essays and anecdotes in which Anne Fadiman expresses not a love, not an obsession, but a life spent in the willing and complete immersion of books and the beauty of words. Here is a writer whose identity and life have been defined by books. From the compulsive, automatic proof-reading that any bibliophile finds themselves doing on a daily basis, to the beauty of the second-hand bookstore, from the admission that reading A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway invariably makes her want to eat sausages and potato salad, to the feeling of utter and pure contentment that finding a new word in the dictionary can bring, each chapter in Ex Libris discusses a different element of this life immersed in books.

She perfectly describes the parallels between reading and location. You can read anywhere; you can be in the worst place on Earth and reading will carry you away. In this sense, location is irrelevant, because the book is the location. But then there is reading ON location! She gives the examples of reading Wordsworth at Grasmere, Gibbon in Rome and even reading Homer’s Odyssey in Cyclops’s cave! Having barely been able to contain my excitement at reading Virginia Woolf whilst sitting in her garden in Sussex, next to the garden room where I had just viewed her original desk, chair and writing implements, Fadiman’s description of this sensory verisimilitude - like much of the book as a whole - felt like a photograph into my literary experiences and ideas.

She describes the process of merging her books with her husband’s books, something which they only felt ready to do after they had been married to one another for five years and had a child together. The love she feels for books is merged with and mirrored by the love she feels for her husband. This intimacy is very touching and at times profound. In a chapter half way through the book, where she discusses dedications and inscriptions in books, and what they can tell us about past owners of our books, she quotes her favourite inscription, written by her husband in his own book The Enigma of Suicide when he presented a copy to her: “To my beloved wife...This is your book, too. As my life, too, is also yours.”

Whilst her relationship with books is unbreakable though, it is not one of reverence or awe. It is the words that make up a book she loves, not the book as an object. To her, the content is sacred, not the vessel. She writes marginalia in books, leaves them spread-eagled on the floor, turns down the pages, uses them as doorstops and rug-flatteners. As someone who has been known to write shopping lists in the back of Tolstoy, bend small paperbacks in order to fit them in a handbag and of course corrugate many a novel from hours reading in the bath, I particularly rejoiced when reading this chapter. I have many a paperback on my shelves with post-it notes peeping out marking pages of interest. They may not be the pages I would be most interested in now, but I will not remove them because they mark my initial experience of reading the book. I leave my bookmarks in, and when I say bookmark I usually mean whatever was to hand at the time - a train ticket, the receipt for the book, a chocolate wrapper, a photograph. This engagement with books Fadiman describes as carnal love, which seems entirely appropriate and accurate to me. There are those who have more of a relationship of courtly love with their books; they put their books on pedestals inside glass cabinets and carefully turn the pages with immaculate fingers. This is still passion, just a different breed of passion and one which firmly separates book lovers from one another. I find it impossible to understand how someone with the courtly love approach can truly engage with a book; how do they remember where they first read the book, or what they were eating at the time?! What do they read in the bath or on the train? Equally though I have been accused of desecrating books by someone who found it impossible to see my carnal love approach as any kind of affection, let alone passion. I love the fact that one of my three year old daughters favourite books is tattered around the edges where she has chewed and cuddled it, that a page in the middle has a milk stain on it and another page some purple crayon because she felt a flower in the story should be purple. Fadiman is wonderfully unapologetic about these characteristics and feelings of a self-confessed bibliophile.

This submission to books; her surrender to words and their power on her is what makes this book truly wonderful. She describes what seems to me a higher spiritual state of wordy contentment to which any word-addict aspires. In communicating her passion for books and their transformative potential and ability, she creates a transformative book herself; one that has the power to excite and challenge us and make us think about what it means to be ourselves, as well as what it means to be with our books.

The Vampyre, by John Polidori.

I first came across The Vampyre when I was studying English at university. My tutor, Dr. Markman Ellis, an expert in eighteenth century and gothic literature, introduced me to what he called ‘the original vampire story.’ I was hooked and listened to everything he said after that. This hatched my interest in the literary obscure; those books which have slipped down the back of the mainstream bookshelf but very firmly deserve an audience.
The tale of how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was produced has become a literary legend: on 16th June 1816, Byron was entertaining Percy Byshee Shelley and Mary at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. The Shelleys were unable to return to where they were staying that evening in Chapuis because of a dramatic change in the weather, so Byron invited them to spend the night at the villa. As the night wore on and the storms - caused by the eruption of the volcano Tambora in Indonesia - became increasingly violent, the group took turns in reading aloud stories from the Fantasmagoriana, a collection of German ghost stories. This inspired Byron to challenge his companions to each write a ghost story of their own. Although determined to rise to the challenge, for two days Mary was unable to find inspiration, until she apparently had a ‘waking dream’ where she saw the figure of Frankenstein’s monster come alive and the horror on the face of his creator. And so The Modern Prometheus was born.
But what of the other ‘ghost stories’ to have emerged from that dark and stormy night? Percy Shelley and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, both failed to produce stories. Byron wrote part of a story entitled ‘Augustus Darvell’ and John Polidori, Byron’s friend and personal physician, started his novel, Ernestus Berchtold.
Two years later an anonymous package arrived at the New Monthly Magazine. It contained information about the kind of activities Byron and Shelley engaged in by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, which had been a subject of some fascination and discussion during the previous two years; Byron had something of a reputation and was at the time the worlds most famous living writer, so there was much excitement that the package also contained a story which appeared to have been written by him, The Vampyre. The story contained many references to some of Byron’s best known poems and the main character, Lord Ruthven, seemed to be based on Byron himself. However, it soon transpired that The Vampyre was not written by Byron, but by his companion and doctor, John Polidori.
Polidori uses the eighteenth century convention of the grand tour as a device for opening out the two main characters to the reader and as we follow Lord Ruthven and Aubrey across Europe, we accompany them on a journey of discovering the true nature of one another. This is a truly chilling and sinister part of The Vampyre which sets the tension and atmosphere for the rest of the story. Written in response to Byron’s ‘Augustus Darvell’, the central idea of which is a character who arranges for his impending death to be concealed by the man with whom he is travelling, Polidori develops this idea in The Vampyre so that the promise to conceal the death is a relatively small aspect of the story, but the consequences are devastating. The promise itself only comes once the tension of the story has already been well established; the true identity of the mysterious Lord Ruthven, which we ponder along with his friend and travelling companion, Aubrey. Despite the title of the story and the description of Ruthven as having a “..deadly hue of his face, which never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion, though its form and outline were beautiful.” Polidori manages to keep us from deciding whether his primary character is a vampire, or if we are deliberately being led into a literary trap, almost until the end of the story. The building of tension and character, not to mention circumstance, is so utterly convincing that when the hideous consequences of the promise begin to unfold, we do not question why the promise is not broken, but simply empathise with the characters involved. And being able to put yourself in the position of characters in a vampire story has got to be an achievement worth applauding in itself, especially at the beginning of the twenty-first century when the vampire is rarely used as a figure for creating true horror but more often as a device for rather camp and sardonic thriller.
As Dr. Ellis pointed out, The Vampyre was the original vampire story. Before Polidori’s ‘ghost story’, tales of vampires and nosferatu were still largely confined to the eastern parts of Europe where incidences of such beings were part of local myth and legend. The huge success of The Vampyre began an obsession and curiosity about vampires which appears to still be in place today. It is a hugely important work of literature which should be a household name. Without The Vampyre, there would be no Dracula, who we tend to think of as the epitome of vampirism. But the vampire as intelligent and cultured, even as aristocratic, was the invention of Polidori. He took the European folklore of the nosferatu - the undead predator - and transformed it into what we now consider to be the standard of the image of a vampire.
Reading The Vampyre today has the same effect on me as it did the first time I read it. Apart from being a fascinating idea dealt with in a highly original manner, it reminds me of when I was eight years old, hiding behind a cushion when there were Daleks on Dr. Who, but being unable to stop myself from watching, if even with only one half open eye. You know what is coming but you keep watching anyway, hoping right until the last minute that something will happen, some twist you would never have thought of strides in and changes the course of events. As you read The Vampyre - which I believe is the original page turner - you have your suspicions about what is going to happen but you hope to the pit of your stomach that you are wrong. Is your hope in vain? You will have to read The Vampyre to find out.
________________
John Polidori, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre.
Oxford World Classics. Pb. pp.306. £6.99.

Literati.

Ok, this is the first posting on my blog. My intention is to write reviews of literature - mainly modernism, some obscure - but also some contemporary and 'forgotten' books as well. Just to get started though, I have decided to begin with a list of my favourite books, in no particular order:

1. Beyond the Glass, by Antonia White.
2. A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster.
3. Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson.
4. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert.
5. The Sea House, by Esther Freud.
6. Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolf.
7. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf.
8. The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen.
9. Zofloya, by Charlotte Dacre.
10.The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
11.The Collector, by John Fowles.
12.A Life's Work, by Rachel Cusk.
13.Exposure, by Kathryn Harrison.
14.Faces in the Water, by Janet Frame.
15.Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte.
16.Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh.
17.The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath.
18.The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene.
19.The Aspern Papers, by Henry James.
20.Collected Stories, by Carol Shields.


And favourite plays:
1. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (quite simply the best play ever written in the English language)
2. Ghosts, by Henrik Ibsen.
3. A Doll's House, by Henrik Ibsen.
4. The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov.
5. An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde.

It is unlikely I will be writing here every day, but it is my earnest intention to post as often as I can. Watch this space for the first review of the Literature Advocate!